ROBERT TRESSELL

1870-1911Irish

"Every man who is not helping to bring about a better state of affairs for the future is helping to perpetuate the present misery."

On 3 February 1911, a 40 year-old signwriter and decorator
called Robert Noonan died of tuberculosis in the Royal Infirmary in Liverpool.
Without family or friends in the city, he received a pauper’s burial, and was
interred in a public grave with twelve others in Walton Park cemetery. Three
hundred miles away, in a deed-box in Hastings, lay the handwritten manuscript
of his unpublished novel, The Ragged
Trousered Philanthropists. The story of how this book became a major
influence on socialist thinking is rather more remarkable than his life.

Noonan’s origins were, for many years, shrouded in mystery
but it has now been established that he was born in Dublin on 18 February 1870,
and was the son of Mary Noonan. His father was named as Samuel Croker, a
former member of the constabulary and later a resident magistrate at Ennis,
County Clare. The birth certificate records his mother as Mary Croker, formerly Noonan,
but they were not married; she was instead his long-term mistress, with whom she
had up to seven children.Croker was eighty
years old when Robert was born, and had previously fathered another six
children with his wife.

Robert’s early years were spent in Dublin where Croker had
provided a property and a £100 annuity for Robert’s mother. Samuel Croker was
living in London in 1874 and it seems Mary Noonan, and presumably the rest of
family, were living there when Croker died in January 1875. On 29 March 1875
Mary married Sebastian Zumbuhl, a Swiss cabinet maker and they remained in
London up to 1883 before moving to Liverpool in 1884. Little is known of Noonan’s
life during this period until on 10 June 1890 he is sentenced to six months’
imprisonment for burglary and larceny involving a quantity of silver and
electro-plated articles stolen from the home of Charles Fay in Courtney Road, Great
Crosby on the outskirts of Liverpool. Noonan is described as a signwriter,
living in Queens Road, Everton.

On his release from prison, Noonan emigrated to South Africa
where he found work as a decorator. On 15 October 1891, he married the
eighteen-year-old Elizabeth Madeline Hartel in Cape Town and in September 1892
they had a daughter, Kathleen. By 1894, they had separated, probably because of
Elizabeth’s infidelity, and Noonan moved to Johannesburg. In late 1895 Elizabeth
became pregnant by another man and Noonan commenced divorce proceedings,
obtaining an uncontested divorce in Cape Town in February 1897, when he was awarded
custody of their daughter, Kathleen.

In Johannesburg, he worked as a sign writer and foreman for
a large decorating company, and it was there that he first became involved in
organised labour bodies, becoming Secretary of the Transvaal Federated Building
Trades Council in 1897. Noonan earned good money, and had a comfortable life,
being able to send his daughter for a convent education, and live in good
accommodation. During 1898 he became a member of the Transvaal Executive
Committee of the Centennial of 1798 Association, which commemorated the
revolutionary nationalist United Irishmen. He also became a junior foreman.

In May 1899, he attended the launch of the International
Independent Labour Party. There was simmering conflict in South Africa at this
time, which eventually erupted into the second Boer War later in 1899. Noonan
helped form the Irish Brigades which opposed the British, and was ready to
fight, but left for Cape Town before the war started, where he lived in some
comfort with his daughter, his widowed sister, Adelaide, and her son. It was
late in 1901 that they set sail for England.

The four of them settled in St Leonards in East Sussex.
These were difficult times in the labour market, and although Noonan’s
decorating skills enabled him to find work, his earnings were substantially
less than they had been in South Africa. Over the next few years, Noonan was
not politically active, but the worsening economic climate caused a steady
decline in his income, and he became more vociferous in his socialist views.
Not an orator by nature, he did little public speaking, but could argue his
beliefs eloquently in conversation, and he attended meetings of the Social
Democratic Federation in 1908-9. As his income declined, so did his health, so
he cut back on his political activities and he started to set down his
experiences and beliefs in the form of fiction. His book documented the
struggles and deprivations of painters and decorators working in the fictional
seaside town of Muggsborough, a thinly disguised portrayal of Hastings.He finished writing The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists in 1910; concerned at
reprisals should he be identified as the author of such a controversial work,
he adopted the pen name of Robert Tressell.

Failing to find a publisher, and in worsening health, Noonan
set off to Liverpool in August 1910, apparently to make arrangements for him
and his daughter to emigrate to Canada. He left Kathleen working at his sister
Mary-Jane’s school in Hastings. In November, he was admitted into the Royal
Liverpool Infirmary. His sister declined to lend his daughter the train fare to
see him, and they learned by telegram of his death on 4 February 1911. None of
the family contributed to, or attended the funeral, and he was laid in a
pauper’s grave.

Kathleen’s wish to see her father’s work published was
fulfilled after she showed the manuscript to a friend, the writer Jessie Pope.
Pope approached her publishers, Grant Richards, who agreed to purchase the
original manuscript for £25, on the basis that Pope would edit the book to
their specification. The result was a substantially reduced version from which
most of the political content was removed, leaving a tale of the working class (with
a different ending) published in an expensive edition aimed firmly at the
middle-class reader. Sales were promising at the outset, but declined after the
outbreak of war. The publishers released a budget-priced but even shorter
version in 1918, which reduced the original 250,000 word text to 90,000.
Similar editions were released in the U.S.A. and Canada in 1914, the Soviet
Union in 1920 and Germany in 1925. The 1914 edition was republished in 1935,
but the book achieved greater prominence when Penguin produced a sixpenny
paperback edition in 1940. Copies were distributed to the allied forces, and it
is interesting to speculate if the novel, even in its much-reduced format, had
any influence in the run-up to the Labour landslide in the 1945 election.

It was Fred Ball, Robert Noonan’s biographer, who tracked
down the original hand-written manuscript of the book, from which he produced
the first complete edition published by Lawrence and Wishart, the publishers
for the Communist Party, in 1955. The book has achieved iconic status in
socialist thinking, and has been acknowledged as a major influence during their
formative years by many leading labour politicians and trade unionists. The
manuscript itself is now in the care of the T.U.C. archive at the London
Metropolitan Archive, and can be seen here.

Our edition uses the 1955 text, and was published by kind
permission of the late Reg Johnson, on behalf of the Robert Tressell estate.

The cemetery where he was laid to rest was not located until 1968, and his grave not until 1970. It remained unmarked until 1977, when local trade unionists and socialists arranged for a granite stone to be put in place. The annual Bob Tressell festival begins with the laying of a wreath upon his grave.

[Thanks to the Bob Tressell Festival for providing
additional information for this article.]